Star Wars needs its new characters so much more than its endlessly recycled ones

polygon.com:

The Star Wars franchise is constantly producing a stream of profitable new material and merchandising, but strangely, it still seems to be struggling. Over the past five years, Disney has repeatedlyannounced plansfornew movies, thenunceremoniously canceled them, or just kept themsilently back-burnered. Disney Plus’ recent Star Wars TV shows keeppromising new directionsfor the franchise, thenpulling backandmixing messages. Fans still enthusiastically engage with Star Warsvideo games,novels,comics, andanimated shows, but the fandom is splintered, and there’s no clear vision or coherent narrative direction to the franchise as a whole. Everybody seems to want something different out of Star Wars.

So Polygon is gathering some thoughts about the franchise’s future under the loose banner of What We Want From Star Wars. These opinion essays lay out what we love about the Star Wars universe, and where we hope it’ll go in the future… or a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away.

It’s become a cliché at this point to note how much time the Star Wars franchise has spent repeating itself — or, to put it more bluntly, hiding behind the past. The original Star Wars trilogy has such a stranglehold over Star Wars’ collective imagination that it’s been incredibly hard for the franchise to move past it. Since 1983’s Return of the Jedi — in other words, fornearly 40 years now — the vast majority of Star Wars material has focused on history rather than the future, filling in the galactic backstory that led up to that original story arc. Even stories that move past Return of the Jedi’s ending have often either obsessively imitated the original Star Wars run, or narratively looped back to it, prioritizing old, familiar characters over new